Three decades of societal and cultural Digital Material alignment of new media yielded to a media host of innovations, trials, and problems, matters media accompanied by versatile popular and Digital Material academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an estab­ lished academic discipline, and this begs Tracing New Media the question: where do we stand now? matters Which new questions emerge now new media are taken for granted, and which in Everyday Life riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about ‘you’, the schäfer tobias mirko raessens joost lehmann ann-sophie edited by marianne van den boomen sybille lammes and Technology participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as ‘you’? The contribu­ tors of the present book, all teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their ‘digital material’ into an an­ thology, covering issues ranging from desk­ top metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e­learning, from role­playing games and Cybergoth music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a ‘digital­ materialist’ perspective. The editors are all teaching and researching in the program New Media and Digital Culture at the Department for Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. edited by marianne van den boomen, ISBN 978-90-896-4068-0 sybille lammes, ann-sophie lehmann, www.aup.nl joost raessens, 978 908964 0680 amsterdam university press amsterdam university press and mirko tobias schäfer Digital Material Digital Material Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology Edited by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer Amsterdam University Press MediaMatters is a new series published by Amsterdam University Press on current debates about media technology and practices. International scholars critically analyze and theorize the materiality and performativity, as well as spatial practices of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in contributions that engage with today’s digital media culture. For more information about the series, please visit: www.aup.nl The publication of this book was made possible with the financial support of the GATE project, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands ICT Research and Innovation Authority (ICT Regie), the Transformations in Art and Culture programme (NWO) and the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme (NWO). We would also like to express our thanks to the Research Institute for History and Culture (OCG) and the Department of Med- ia and Culture Studies at Utrecht University for their kind support. Cover illustration: Goos Bronkhorst Cover design: Suzan de Beijer, Weesp Lay out: JAPES, Amsterdam ISBN 978 90 8964 068 0 e-ISBN 978 90 4850 666 8 NUR 670 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) All authors / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009 Some rights reversed. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Table of contents Introduction: From the virtual to matters of fact and concern 7 Processor Joost Raessens Serious games from an apparatus perspective 21 David B. Nieborg Empower yourself, defend freedom! Playing games during times of war 35 Eggo Müller Formatted spaces of participation: Interactive television and the changing relationship between production and consumption 49 Erna Kotkamp Digital objects in e-learning environments: The case of WebCT 65 Memory Imar de Vries The vanishing points of mobile communication 81 Jos de Mul The work of art in the age of digital recombination 95 Berteke Waaldijk The design of world citizenship: A historical comparison between world exhibitions and the web 107 Isabella van Elferen ‘And machine created music’: Cybergothic music and the phantom voices of the technological uncanny 121 Network William Uricchio Moving beyond the artefact: Lessons from participatory culture 135 Mirko Tobias Schäfer Participation inside? User activities between design and appropriation 147 5 Marinka Copier Challenging the magic circle: How online role-playing games are negotiated by everyday life 159 Douglas Rushkoff Renaissance now! The gamers’ perspective 173 Screen Frank Kessler What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real 187 Eva Nieuwdorp The pervasive interface: Tracing the magic circle 199 Nanna Verhoeff Grasping the screen: Towards a conceptualization of touch, mobility and multiplicity 209 Sybille Lammes Terra incognita: Computer games, cartography and spatial stories 223 Keyboard Thomas Poell Conceptualizing forums and blogs as public sphere 239 Marianne van den Boomen Interfacing by material metaphors: How your mailbox may fool you 253 Ann-Sophie Lehmann Hidden practice: Artists’ working spaces, tools, and materials in the digital domain 267 About the authors 283 Index 285 6 digital material Introduction From the virtual to matters of fact and concern All that is solid melts into air Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848 Technology is society made durable Bruno Latour, 1991 The 1982 Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ election was a special one. For the first time in the history of this traditional annual event, a non-human was cele- brated: the computer was declared ‘Machine of the Year 1982’. The cover dis- played a table with a personal computer on it, and a man sitting passively next to it and looking rather puzzled. On the 2006 Time’s election cover once again a computer was shown, now basically a screen reflecting the ‘Person of the Year’: ‘YOU. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.’ Within 24 years the computer seemed to have changed from an exciting, mys- terious machine with unknown capabilities into a transparent mirror, reflecting you, your desires and your activities. Apparently, digital machines embody no un- solved puzzles any more. At the beginning of the 21st century, they are so widely distributed and used that we take them for granted – though we still call them ‘new media’. Computers, e-mail, the Internet, mobile phones, digital photo al- bums, and computer games have become common artefacts in our daily lives. Part of the initial spell has worn off, yet new spells have been cast as well, and some of the old spells still haunt the discourse about the so-called new media. Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of digital machinery yielded a host of innovations, trials, failures, and problems, accompanied by hype-hopping popular and academic discourse. Meanwhile, new media studies crystallized in- ternationally into an established academic discipline, especially when the first academic bachelor and master programs were institutionalized ten years ago, in- cluding the Utrecht program, New Media and Digital Culture.1 A decade of un- folding the field implores us to reflect on where we stand now. Which new ques- tions emerge when new media are taken for granted, and which puzzles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about ‘you’, or do we still not really fathom the digital machinery and how it constitutes us as ‘you’? The con- tributors to the present book, all teaching and researching new media and digital 7 culture, and all involved in the Utrecht Media Research group, assembled their ‘digital material’ into an anthology to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Utrecht program. Together, the contributions provide a showcase of current state-of-the–art research in the field, from what we as editors have called a ‘digi- tal-materialist’ perspective. Immaterial, im/material, in-material Popular discourse in the 1990s framed new media chiefly as possessing new and amazing qualities. They were believed to fundamentally transform the way we think, live, love, work, learn, and play. Hypertext, virtual reality, and cyberspace were the predominant buzzwords. They announced a new frontier of civilization, whether from an optimistic utopian perspective – pointing to the emergence of virtual communities, new democracy, and a new economy – or from a more pes- simistic and dystopian angle – with warnings against the digital divide, informa- tion glut, and ubiquitous surveillance. Yet, both outlooks were rooted in the same idea: that new media marked a shift from the material to the immaterial, a gener- al transformation of atoms into bits (Negroponte 1995) and of matter into mind (Barlow 1996). These lines of reasoning were characterized by what we may call digital mysticism, a special brand of technological determinism in which digitality and software are considered to be ontologically immaterial determinants of new media. New media and their effects were thus framed as being ‘hyper’, ‘virtual’, and ‘cyber’–that is, outside of the known materiality, existing independently of the usual material constraints and determinants, such as material bodies, politics, and the economy. Though this kind of discourse was criticized right from the start as a specific ideology (Barbrook and Cameron 1995), it proved to be persis- tent, and traces of it can still be discerned in the current academic discourse. When new media appeared on the radar of media and